"Del Johnson" delastro@{right star in Orion's belt}.sdsu.edu wrote in
message ...
I saw a Harley-Davidson motorcycle rider with a T-shirt that read "If I
have
to explain it to you, then you will not understand." I am beginning to
feel the same way about this topic.

I've got a pretty thick skin after spending several years on Usenet so that
I personally don't take offense to statements such as this, but such
condescension is uncalled for.

Let me make this simple and clear. People are rushing in early to RMTC
primarily to get a good deal on equipment, then they hope to win the big
14-inch Meade telescope, and then they go home. If you think that
everything was packed on Sunday then we must have gone to two different
conferences.

People do rush in on Friday to buy equipment, but making them wait until
Saturday would merely postpone the feeding frenzy by one day. Without
equipment sales, then the place would be a ghost town on Friday as well,
reducing the RTMC to a even more of a one-day event.

I never said that everything was packed on Sunday, only that the annex
workshops were. As I indicated earlier, your claim that they were packed
only because there was nothing else going on is contradicted by your own
statement about all the activity on Saturday, when the annex was packed as
well.

Moving one of the major door prizes to Sunday might bump up attendance, but
that would merely be pandering to the very thing that you bemoan.

Your other proposals involve restrictions on access and activity: no entry
before Friday afternoon, and no vendor sales until Saturday. Even moving the
merit awards back to Sunday restricts people's opportunity to look at and
through those telescopes, which really is why the RTMC was created in the
first place, to promote amateur telescope making. The response to moving the
merit awards to Saturday has been overwhelmingly positive.

Greg is right in that changing policies to restrict access at the RTMC isn't
going to change the materialism present in the hobby.